There's been a lot of speculation in recent months about the upcoming Star Wars anthology film, Rogue One, and not all of it has been good. Recent reports of reshoots on the project have expanded into glaring rumours about the film's production and Disney being unhappy with the project's story and tone. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director Gareth Edwards reassured that, as with most films of this scale, the reshoots were a planned part of the process. “I mean it was always part of the plan to do reshoots. We always knew we were coming back somewhere to do stuff. We just didn’t know what it would be until we started sculpting the film in the edit.” He added, “There’s lots of little things that we have to get, but it’s all little things within the preexisting footage. Obviously, you’ve got to work around everyone’s schedule, and everyone’s on different films all over the world, and so it’s a bit of a logistical nightmare…That’s why I think it’s been blown out of proportion a little bit.”
Edwards insisted that his vision hasn't ben undermined in the process,“I’d definitely describe it as: It’s got dark tone,” he said. “The studio has been very supportive of that. I mean, the sort of tone we were going for when we started was the tone you have in films like The Empire Strikes Back. And that’s not in any way been compromised.” Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy also backed up Edwards, reaffirming that the story and tone has always remained the same and that the rehoots were necessary in order to complete the story they are trying to tell. “There’s nothing about the story that’s changing, with a few things that we’re picking up in additional photography…I think that’s the most important thing, to reassure fans that it’s the movie we intended to make. One of the things we’re doing with these Star Wars stories is embracing the uniqueness of the different genres, and we’re very deliberately leaning into the various styles of directors that we’re approaching so that each of these movies will very intentionally have a very different tone and style from the saga films. Gareth has shown a stylistic preference that’s much more handheld, visceral, inside-the-action kind of feel.”
In terms of how the film will open, Kennedy surprsingly revealed that she doesn't know whether or not the film will use the 'opening crawl' that has been present in every Star Wars film ever made. “We talk about that all the time. It’s something that we’re right in the midst of discussing even now, so I don’t want to say definitively what we’re doing,” Kennedy told the magazine. “The crawl and some of those elements live so specifically within the ‘saga’ films that we are having a lot of discussion about what will define the [stand-alone] Star Wars Stories separate and apart from the saga films. So we’re right in the middle of talking about that.” Given that most Star Wars related stories (even the recen comics and the Clone Wars TV series) have used the iconic opening in some way, it may be safe to assume the team will eventually opt to use it in the end.
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story releases December 16, 2016.